Jephté, tragédie tirée du latin de George Buchanan : Florent Chrestien traducteur, poète et polémiste

Abstract

In 1567, Louis Rabier published Florent Chrestien’s Jephté ou le Vœu for the first time. The French Reformed poet presented this drama from the beginning as the translation of George Buchanan’s original Latin tragedy, which was published by Guillaume Morel with much success in 1554. The French tragedy also brought some fame to Florent Chrestien, though it is not his only work, due to his gifts as a poet and polemicist. Both of these aspects are brought out by a comparative study of some particularly relevant elements taken from the plays of both authors. Florent Chrestien remained faithful to the spirit of the Scottish poet, who was perfectly able to obey the rules of Latin. Nonetheless, he showed innovative poetic qualities, both through his skill in French prosody and versification (polyrhythms, run-on lines, terza rima, significant rhymes), which developed at the time under the influence of the Pléiade. In order to give depth to the tragic meaning of the plot, his adaptation of traditionally rhetorical devices to poetry (such as onomatopoeia and chiasmus) was also innovative. In 1567, as a polemicist who paid great attention to the events of his time, Chrestien was anxious to link an ancient Biblical story to his contemporaries’ concerns, whereas in 1554, Buchanan was more discreet about the dramaturgical expression of his own religious beliefs. A detailed comparison of some extracts taken from both tragedies reveals how Chrestien’s subtle additions gave his play a strong Christian, and even Reformed overtone, in contrast with Buchanan, who played on the ambiguity and universality of a story that the earliest Christian literature had already marked out as a strongly symbolical anecdote.